Inktank and SUSE®, today, announced a strategic partnership to jointly provide enterprise class support for the Ceph Distributed Storage System as part of SUSE Cloud. The only company today providing commercial support for Ceph, Inktank is the only company today providing enterprise-grade, commercial support for Ceph. With this agreement, Inktank will ensure that SUSE Cloud customers receive the same level of open source support that SUSE has delivered over the past twenty years. And by integrating Ceph with SUSE Cloud, the first OpenStack-based enterprise private cloud solution, SUSE is delivering the most reliable and cost-effective distributed storage infrastructure available for private clouds.

As enterprises increasingly move their applications to the cloud, companies are seeking open and flexible cloud solutions that will provide highly scalable storage to handle their ever-growing data requirements. Both SUSE Cloud and Ceph are based on open source, giving companies the flexibility to design the best cloud deployments for their individual needs, using existing infrastructure. The Future of Storage™, Ceph provides cloud storage that is self-healing and self-managing, while autoscaling to accommodate even the most demanding enterprise needs. SUSE Cloud simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of physical cloud infrastructure.

Ceph has been integrated into the OpenStack project and provides highly scalable object and block storage for cloud deployments using SUSE Cloud, which is based on OpenStack. Under the new partnership between Inktank and SUSE, enterprise customers of SUSE Cloud can quickly leverage Ceph for their cloud storage needs, with expert support available each step of the way. SUSE will provide support for Ceph components directly to all customers of SUSE Cloud. Inktank will provide engineering support to SUSE to ensure quick resolution of technical issues.

Through the inclusion of the Crowbar software framework, an open source project sponsored by Dell, SUSE Cloud automates set-up and management tasks of cloud infrastructure, including Ceph distributed storage environments. Both Inktank and SUSE are active contributors to the Crowbar Project, which helps ensure that a joint OpenStack and Ceph solution can be implemented simply and provides enterprises with maximum flexibility to configure their clouds.

"SUSE Cloud is designed for the enterprise that wants to increase agility and reduce costs with private and hybrid cloud solutions. Companies embracing cloud and working with big data, need highly scalable and reliable storage. Ceph's technology meets those demanding requirements," said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing, SUSE. "Together SUSE and Inktank are helping more companies leverage the power of the open source cloud, and backing that technology with industry leading services and support."

"SUSE Cloud is designed to improve agility and reduce costs for companies through private and hybrid cloud solutions. As more companies move to the cloud, they need scalable and reliable storage. Ceph's technology is highly advanced and exceeds today's storage requirements," said Michael Miller, vice president of global marketing and alliances, SUSE. "Together SUSE and Inktank are helping more enterprises to leverage the power of the open source cloud, knowing their deployments are future-ready and scalable."

"Ceph's uniquely scalable architecture makes it ideal for the cloud. That's why Ceph is being swiftly embraced by the industry and being integrated into the Linux kernel, OpenStack and a growing number of other cloud platforms," said Bryan Bogensberger, president and COO, Inktank. "Inktank is eager to work with SUSE to bring Ceph's transformational unprecented storage capabilities to more customers, while giving them the support they need to get the most out of their cloud investments."

"We are pleased that SUSE and Intank areactively contributing to Crowbar, an open source software framework developed by Dell and leveraged by Dell OpenStack and Hadoop solutions, to deliver a simple to use but robust provisioning framework. Crowbar is a fresh approach to cloud tooling, and its practical and accessible model is attracting a great cross-industry community," said John Igoe, executive director of cloud and big data solutions, Dell. "We're excited that SUSE and Inktank have has worked with us to extend the capabilities of Crowbar to support the easy deployment of Ceph as part of a SUSE Cloud private cloud environment."

SUSE®, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux and cloud infrastructure solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed—today and tomorrow. For more information, visit us at www.suse.com.

Inktank is the company delivering Ceph—the massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system. Launched by some of the leading developers of Ceph, Inktank's mission is to help organizations fully leverage the transformative power of Ceph to decrease storage costs, increase operational flexibility and help them free themselves from restrictive and expensive proprietary storage systems. Inktank provides best-in-class professional services and support offerings to enterprises, service providers, and cloud platforms. Please visit www.inktank.com for more information.

About Ceph

Ceph, The Future of Storage™, is a transformative, universal storage system. Ceph is the first and only distributed storage solution designed to enable object, block and filesystem storage in a single cluster with unlimited scalability. The platform is capable of auto-scaling to the exabyte level and beyond, it runs on commodity hardware, it is self-healing and self-managing, and has no single point of failure. Ceph is in the Linux kernel; Ceph can be accessed natively via programming languages; Ceph can be accessed via the Swift and S3 APIs; Ceph is integrated with the OpenStack™ cloud operating system; and Ceph is integrated with the Apache CloudStack project. As a result of its open source nature, this portable storage platform may be installed and used in public or private clouds. Please visit www.ceph.com for more information.